教育技术学专业英语第十一章.docVIP

The “New Age” of research in Educational Technology: A Focus on Learning Environments The ideas of carefully designing instruction, varying the formats in which information is presented to students, and building interactive simulations lead naturally to the idea of constructing entire “Learning Environments”, in which the student has unprecedented freedom to act. Increasingly today, researchers in educational technology study students working in complete learning environments. Learning Environments can either be entirely natural, or they can be artificial, existing only through the agency of technology. Of course, learning always takes place in an environment. In the eighteenth century, Rousseau (1762) argued that the most effective and socially appropriate education arose from a student’s interaction with Nature------the natural environment. More recently, educators have proposed that a modified natural environment can serve to meet more specific learning objectives, through cognitive (Brown et al. , 1989) or professional and vocational (Lave Wenger , 1991) apprenticeships. Apprentices work in a natural environment that has either been modified for pedagogical purposes , or within which the apprentice’s freedom to act is limited , so that, in accordance with good instructional design, apprentices’ learning can be guided to bring about knowledge construction. Schools are also learning environments. However, they are recent on the scale of human history and quite artificial (Winn Windschitl , 2001) .More often than not, all that students learn in them is how to be students (Brown , 1997). Many technology------supported learning environments simulate some aspect of the natural environment. This allows learning to be “authentic”, engaging students in projects that have some meaningful connection with problems that exist in the real, nonsimulated world. Because most authentic real --- world activities involve more than one person, it follows that most technolo